We all love cocktails, we all love making cocktails or drinking cocktails. When we make cocktails at home we want to have a well stock bar. In this episode I'm going to show you The Last Word on how to start your liquor cabinet.

Welcome to the Cocktail Spirit from Small Screen Network. I'm your host Robert Hess.

Now as I mentioned building up your own cocktail bar your liquor cabinet if you will can be a don’t think task, I mean just imagine having to go to liquor store and pick up that stuff what do you pickup, what do you not pickup, how much do you spend? Believe me it can get expensive. Quite often I talked to people they want me to give them a shopping list, things that goes liquor store and pickup that they think they should have, have their bar at all time rum, brandy, orange curacao, vermouth all that stuff.

The problem is, it’s expensive and you don’t know how to use it. What I constantly recommend to people, you are using a shopping list is the wrong way to go. What is a far batter way to go is build your liquor cabinet up one drink at a time.

You all got a favorite cocktail a cocktail you like going to bar and having all the time. Find the recipe for that one cocktail, find the cocktail book that you think has a bunch of recipes in it. This particular book has a lot of the modern recipes in it and you can refer to. There's not much more information other than recipes, but its got a lot of recipes in it.

Find your favorite cocktail in this book. Go to liquor store and buy what you need for that. If you want to spend all with extra time check some other cocktail books out and see if they have the same recipe. If they have a slightly different recipe then you can apply your different ingredients buy those ingredients too with one cocktail. Then make that drink up. Have at one then. Make it on the next day, make it up on the next day, make it up a multiple times, and play around with recipe. Try different ratios because one thing you know if you look at some of these cocktail books quite often the recipes aren’t quite the same sometimes ingredients are in slightly different ratios or sometimes the ingredients are completely different.

Take something like the my type for instance sometimes it has pineapple juice, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it has grenadine, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes uses a couple of different types of rums, sometimes it only uses one. So look at the different recipes figure out what's going on and seeing if you can find the recipe you like the best. After about six to eight months of doing this, besides having a lot of fun you'll end up with a really well stock bar and to top it up you know a cocktail to be made with every single bottle there that’s important aspect to make your cocktail bar. Do it slowly, do it gradually and train yourself at the same time.

To get started we’re going to do a cocktail called The Last Word. It’s a fairly old cocktail that chances are you’ve never heard of it before. It is a drink that very few recipe book even have. It was found by a friend of mine Marie Stinson it is like café when he was taking and looking through an old cocktail book, he happen to have on his counter. It’s uses Chartreuse, Maraschino Liqueur, gin and lime juice, let's get started.

The ingredients are in equal proportions so it doesn’t matter how much you use as long as you use equal proportions. If you're going to use half ounce use a half ounce for everything. If you're going to use an ounce do an ounce for everything.

I'm going to take and do this with an ounce of all the ingredients so there's one ounce of Plymouth gin, one ounce of Maraschino Liqueur using a jigger to holds up to two ounces here so I pour both of them at once. You might want to take in pour them separately because if you make a mistake on Maraschino Liqueur you got to throw both things out, an ounce of chartreuse and finally and ounce of lime juice. Anytime you use juice you should always use fresh juices.

I'm using an antique juicer that I bought on eBay a while back that I think works absolutely fabulously. We’ll cover the tools in the later episode. And there's an ounce for that. Now we have the ice.

You notice I didn’t have ice in my share to begin with because if I taken awhile putting all these ingredients together the ice would have melt in the water. And now I'm putting ice in and I'm going to shake it up.

When you shake it also important to make sure you shake enough. The drink actually should feel cold to your hand almost to a point of hurting as you shaking. What I'm saying is the bartender is going to go flop, flop, flop and that’s it maybe one or two shakes.

And here we have The Last Word Cocktail. Maybe it should be the first cocktail you experiment within building your home bar.